Stratics: What makes your PvP system unique- and/or what major goals are you trying to achieve with it/open up to your players?

Blackguard: This is quite possibly the hardest question ever, because there's so much about our PvP system that is unique. The most immediately evident and probably most important aspect of our system that makes it unique is that it is entirely independent of the PvE system. That is, we can define how things work in PvP and on PvP servers without affecting PvE servers in the slightest. It's something we decided a long time ago--if we're going to do PvP, we do not want it to alter the balance of the PvE game.

And we've done just that. We can balance all of our spells and combat arts specifically for PvP combat. What a spell does in PvE combat can do something entirely different in PvP if necessary. This allows us to focus on balancing both the PvE and PvP game separately, as it should be. We can go to many levels of granularity. Meaning, we can do things like set respawn points for Freeport to be different from those for Qeynos, say that players have immunity for a certain period of time from control spells after they've been used on them, all the way down to changing a damage number for a specific spell. It's awesome the amount of control our designers have over how things are done in PvP vs. PvE.